Link-level measurements from an 802.11b mesh network

By Daniel Aguayo, John C. Bicket, Sanjit Biswas, Glenn Judd, Robert Morris. Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, 2004

1,232 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper analyzes the causes of packet loss in a 38-node urban multi-hop 802.11b network. The patterns and causes of loss are important in the design of routing and error-correction protocols, as well as in network planning.The paper makes the following observations. The distribution of inter-node loss rates is relatively uniform over the whole range of loss rates; there is no clear threshold separating "in range" and "out of range." Most links have relatively stable loss rates from one second to the next, though a small minority have very bursty losses at that time scale. Signal-to-noise ratio and distance have little predictive value for loss rate. The large number of links with intermediate loss rates is probably due to multi-path fading rather than attenuation or interference.The phenomena discussed here are all well-known. The contributions of this paper are an understanding of their relative importance, of how they interact, and of the implications for MAC and routing protocol design.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/04db2151f88cce2f18a0ef74a8a627564f4a3e5f

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Citations in the corpus

Reliability Analysis of DSRC Wireless Communication for Vehicle Safety Applications (2006, background): “The application rangeD for warning message coverage and tolerance time window T to receive the warning message, for different applications, are listed in Table I.”
Temporal properties of low power wireless links: modeling and implications on multi-hop routing (2005, background): “There are also several important empirical studies using medium-power RF radios in indoor and outdoor environments [12, 13].”
ExOR: opportunistic multi-hop routing for wireless networks (2005, methodology): “To reduce the e.ect of interference from Roofnet user traf.c and other sources, the reported values are the median of nine experimental runs.”
XORs in the air: practical wireless network coding (2008, background): “IRELESS networks suffer from low throughput and do not scale to dense deployments [ 1 ].”
Experimental evaluation of wireless simulation assumptions (2004, background): “[15].”
Efficient geographic routing in multihop wireless networks (2005, methodology): “However, in the case of NADV-SNR and NADV-Beacon, we modify the periodic beacon format to include reverse link information, and the message length slightly increases.”
WiLDNet: Design and Implementation of High Performance WiFi Based Long Distance Networks (2007, background): “In comparison, an urban mesh-network deployment (like Roofnet) has shorter and many non-line-of-sight links and thus loss from ISI is a much bigger problem.”
Wireless mesh networks: a survey (2005, background): “MITs Roofnet is an experimental multi-hop 802.11b mesh network [ 4 ,5].”
Toward understanding characteristics of dedicated short range communications (DSRC) from a perspective of vehicular network engineers (2010, methodology): “Experiments were conducted in a 38-node wireless mesh network under an urban environment [2], and a large number of wireless links with intermediate packet loss were observed.”
Performance Evaluation of Scheduling in IEEE 802.16 Based Wireless Mesh Networks (2006, neutral): “Aguayo et al analyzed the causes of packet loss in a 38-node urban multi-hop 802.11b mesh network [7].”
XORs in the Air: Practical Wireless Network Coding (2006, background): “Wireless networks suffer from low throughput and do not scale to dense deployments [1].”
A survey on real-world implementations of mobile ad-hoc networks (2007, background): “In [2] the links in the outdoor network are examined by letting each node send a number of 1500 byte packets.”
MoteLab: a wireless sensor network testbed (2005, methodology): “MIT’s Roofnet [6] has also been used to collect similar data.”
Measurement-based models of delivery and interference in static wireless networks (2006, background): “As a response, there has been a shift towards experimental wireless networks in which packet delivery and higher level metrics have been measured for real radios working in particular network and protocol designs [3, 6, 11].”
Idle sense: an optimal access method for high throughput and fairness in rate diverse wireless LANs (2005, methodology): “Extensive measurements in Roofnet show that the distribution of frame loss rates is relatively uniform over the whole range of loss rates [1].”
Jigsaw: solving the puzzle of enterprise 802.11 analysis (2006, background): “This approach works well for small, controlled active measurements, such as understanding linklevel characteristics of outdoor mesh networks [2], error characteristics of factory environments [26], or components of handoff latency [20].”